There are currently a wide variety of different types of communication systems. Many organizations use these types of communication systems in order to allow remote participants to attend meetings. For instance, it is quite common in many different types of organizations to have frequent meetings where more than two participants take place. It is also common, in today's business environment, for business people to travel. Therefore, many times, participants in a business meeting must attend remotely, even though they are not in the particular meeting room where the meeting is taking place.
In order to provide a reasonable user experience for a remote meeting attendee, communication systems normally attempt to address a problem referred to as “the cocktail party problem”. It has been found that if a communication system provides a single microphone in the center of a cocktail party, a remote listener, who is listening to the signal generated by the single microphone, finds the cocktail party conversation generally unintelligible. However, if two microphones are spaced apart from one another in the cocktail party, and each microphone is provided to a separate speaker for the remote attendee, there is a dramatic increase in intelligibility.
It has also been found that the intelligibility increases further if the two microphones are placed in a binaural configuration. Binaural recording is a type of two-channel stereo recording. In two-channel stereo recording, two microphones are placed in strategically chosen locations relative to the sound source, with both microphones recording simultaneously. The two recorded channels are similar, but each has a distinct time-of-arrival (the time it takes for the sound wave to travel between the sound source and the microphones) and sound level information (due to the difference in the pressure exerted by the sound wave on the two microphones). During playback, the listener's brain uses these subtle differences in timing and sound level to triangulate the positions of the recorded objects.
When microphones are placed in the binaural configuration, this is done in order to further enhance the listener's experience. In Binaural recording, a pair of microphones are placed inside the ears of a dummy head (that is, a model of a human head that includes external ears and ear canals). Each microphone is placed approximately where the ear drum would reside in the dummy head.
When the recording made using microphones in this configuration is played back through headphones, each recording channel is presented independently so that each of the listener's ear drums is driven with a replica of the auditory signal that it would have experienced at the recording location.
Thus, some laboratory communication systems that allow remote participants to attend meetings have used this type of binaural recording. However, this can lead to a number of different problems. It is generally uncomfortable to the local meeting attendees to be sitting at a conference table with one or more dummy heads placed around them.
This type of arrangement also presents other problems as well. For instance, if the microphones are located in excess of approximately 4 cm above the table top, the microphones pick up sound reflections from the table. That is, if someone in the conference room is speaking, the microphone picks up the voice directly from the speaker as well as reflections of the voice off of the table top. These reflections reduce the intelligibility of the signal generated by the microphones as well.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.